apud memoriās
by shmobeline
Summary: Alanna visits Trebond after the events in Lioness Rampant, and spends a little time in the nursery she shared with Thom for the first half of their lives. Concerns canon character death.


A/N: This fic is set reasonably shortly after the end of Lioness Rampant. Alanna is visiting Trebond for some undisclosed reason, but the reason is not important. Latin titles aren't the cool, done thing anymore, but it says what I want it to, and the English translation is too... I don't know. It's not as good. It means around or among memories.

_apud memorias_

The nursery at Trebond was almost eerily quiet when Alanna stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The room was almost shockingly similar to how she remembered. Her and Thom's childhood beds were still in their usual corner, a bedside table set between them. Maude's heavy armchair where she used to sit and read bedtime stories and – more often – scold the twins for their rough play was still in its place by Alanna's bed with the same upholstery it had always sported. The toy chests were by the window, the rocking horse in its corner, and the rug that had suffered more spills than could be counted still graced the hardwood floor.

It was as though this little pocket of space alone had escaped the steady march of time, and she half expected a ten-year-old Alanna and Thom to come bursting in at any moment, fresh from some mischief and ready to cause some more. The thought made her smile even as she brushed it off as nonsense.

Alanna stepped further into the room, stopping by the low table set in the middle. The nursery looked the same, but it felt different. There was no life left here, only memories. There were half-remembered afternoons spent sitting at this table beside her twin, charcoal in hand, drawing pictures of trees and ponies and Maude and Thom and herself. Clearer in her memory were the days later on when Maude had the twins painstakingly practising their penmanship with ink and quill and blots everywhere. There were the times, too, when Alanna had sat impatiently in front of Maude's chair while their nursemaid plaited her hair, Thom making faces at her from across the room.

Thom had always found ways to be irritating, but that was nothing new as far as brothers went. He'd grown huffy when she gave him back as good as she got, but it never lasted long, and they usually made amends by finding ways to terrorise Maude or Coram or one of the other servants together.

They'd made quite a team, she and Thom. They'd grown apart, of course, once she left for Corus and he for the City of the Gods, but in childhood they'd been almost inseparable. It hadn't been uncommon for Maude to come in to wake them to find one or the other sharing their bed. They'd sat at the table together in the dining hall for meals, subtly trading vegetables and other foods that one liked and the other did not. She remembered a favourite pastime had always been to drag Maude's chair into the space between their beds and drape their blankets over it, creating a small, cosy space just for them and the occasional pet to play in.

Her eyes burning with the sorrow her memories had drawn up in her, Alanna suddenly recalled a particular drizzly afternoon almost ten years ago, when Maude had been helping a woman in labour and left the two to their own devices. Alanna crossed the room to the oldest, biggest toy chest and pulled it away from the wall. There, near the bottom of the back side of the chest where no one would see, were two initials; _T + A_.

She looked at the engraved letters and felt tears forming in the corners of her eyes. Thom had etched them into the wood a few weeks before they were to leave and be parted for the next eight years of their lives. She hadn't even thought of them in a decade, and doubted she would have remembered them at all if she hadn't come to the nursery. It had been far too long since she had been at Trebond with Thom, and she realised with an ache in her chest and a shaky in-drawn breath that they would never again have the chance.

Alanna lightly traced the mark her lost brother had left and let her tears fall.

_For my brother._


End file.
